LEGER: Bill C-12, online snoops and the crisis in personal privacy

In Bill C-12, you’ve got government broadening the scope of where it can go online without telling you. And your employer, business partner, Internet provider or bingo hall will be able to give information away with no concern about whether it has the proper authority to do so. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Photo

Just when you thought it was safe to venture out on the Internet, along come the government snoops and their shiny new toy, Bill C-12.

To be sure, we all know about the dark forces on the Internet: the spammers, fraudsters, predators and thieves, not to mention troglodyte commenters. And most of us realize we have to put up with a certain amount of intrusion as the cost of participation.

You shouldn’t have to worry about your government being one of the most persistent intruders, but that’s what it is.

The putative aim of C-12, with the comic-ironic “short title” of “Safeguarding Canadians’ Personal Information Act,” is to improve online privacy and protect personal information. In many circumstances, it will do just the opposite.

Bill C-12 has its roots in legislation dating back to 1980s, when no one understood how Facebook and Google, to use just two examples, would come along and shatter cherished ideas about personal privacy and identity. Early laws established basic privacy principles for information collected by governments but did not foresee how the online world would evolve.

Governments have struggled ever since to keep up. They plod back and forth between protection of individual privacy and “powers to protect,” in which government’s reach stretches further into our lives.

Bureaucracies also appease their political masters, not all of whom agree that the country is stronger when its individuals are free to think and communicate.

The bill’s Conservative proponents claim that C-12 will “protect and empower consumers,” clarify rules for business and “enable effective investigations by law enforcement and security agencies.”

Which is odd, since it will also make it easier for governments, police and maybe even private security firms to pry into your personal business. Call it part of the ground campaign in the ongoing war on privacy.

The new bill follows the crash-and-burn fiasco of an earlier Tory attempt at stripping online privacy rights from Canadians. Last year’s Internet surveillance bill so flagrantly disregarded individual rights that it set off protest storms on the Internet and led to the online shaming of Public Security Minister Vic Toews.

His broad surveillance bill withered in the heat, but like some kind of parliamentary zombie apocalypse, its ideas keep coming back.

Among the highlights of snooping bill 2.0 is a sweeping new coverage area called “policing services,” in which personal information can be passed on without your consent. Remember, current law already allows the government to intrude in privacy when national security, defence or enforcement of the law is involved.

“Policing services” is a description vague enough to tear a new gap in privacy protection. It’s not defined in the bill and a research note from the Library of Parliament says it “appears to add an open-ended and undefined circumstance related to law enforcement” to the list of privacy exceptions.

The bill also is mushy on who is responsible for what information. Say the government asks a third party for information on you. It can be passed on without your knowledge or consent and the third party would be “under no legal obligation to verify that it possesses the necessary lawful authority before disclosing the information.”

But hey, what’s lawful authority anyway? Just more red tape.

So in C-12 you’ve got government broadening the scope of where it can go online without telling you. And your employer, business partner, Internet provider or bingo hall will be able to give information away with no concern about whether it has the proper authority to do so. Feeling better protected?

Now, the bill does have some useful provisions protecting national security and making it harder to pull off online fraud.

But it doesn’t stay within reasonable boundaries, so that civil rights can be protected while giving lawful authorities appropriate powers to defend the state. There is no need to go overboard, as this bill does.

Minister Toews and the rest of the burgeoning national security apparatus should keep that in mind.

Part of public security is private security, the security of the individual. This looks like a case where protection might be needed: against the state itself.

Dan Leger is a freelance journalist in Halifax. Twitter: @dantheeditor